POD’s Top People Performance Tips

As a team of HR professionals dealing with a plethora of people issues and initiatives across so many clients’ businesses each day, here at POD we’ve put our heads together for a quick moment to come up with a quick-reference guide to what we believe overall to be the most critical things you as a business owner or leader should focus on in the People space right now in the form of our Top People Performance Tips.

POD’s Top People Performance Tips:

1: Communicate expectations – It’s simple stuff, but so often missed. Take appropriate opportunities to communicate and reiterate the expectations you have of your employee: so everyone’s clear, on the same page, and set up to succeed. As a minimum this should be done prior to someone joining your business at ‘onboarding stage’, documented within the Position Description and covered off both formally (ie: within a performance appraisal) and informally (ie: in a weekly/fortnightly catch-up) throughout the employment relationship.

2: Connect your people with your business strategy – Your people will work harder for you if they feel ‘in the know’ about where you’re going and feel connected and truly part of something. Your people need to know your vision, how they fit into the big picture and specifically, how their role contributes to what the business is trying to achieve. This can be ‘ticked off’ simply by sharing your vision and business objectives with your team in a meeting forum, through to facilitating a workshop to get people’s ‘buy-in’, through to having your vision up on the wall! However you do it, keep in mind the fact that it takes several times for messages to ‘sink in’, so the risk of ‘over-communicating’ is fairly low!

3: Deal with poor performance – don’t bury your head in the sand! The key thing here is to take action as these situations not dealt with tend to spiral and can also be really demotivating for others in the team who are doing a great job. Think of it as risk prevention to tackle poor performance head-on!

4: Feedback, feedback, feedback – good, or bad! Be prepared to have the tough conversations, whether it’s someone who isn’t behaving as they should, or someone whose performance is not up to scratch. Never pass up the opportunity to make mention of a job well done. Aim for ‘live’ feedback – give feedback to your people on-the-go and just see what a difference it makes. We guarantee you’ll see your culture transform from a reactive one, where you’re constantly fielding people ‘pains’ to seeing positive improvements in people culture and performance.

5: Fluffy HR is a thing of the past! The first step to building a great company culture? Make ‘People’ part of your strategy – drive the ‘People’ agenda as you drive your business objectives – and there’s nothing fluffy about that. In other words, your People are the link to your business’s success… and should form part of your ‘top table’ discussions.

6: Let an HR system take care of the People compliance, so you can focus on points 1 – 5 above – in this technology age, the headache of people compliance (ensuring employment agreements are in place for all for example) can be automated and eliminated with the right system.

There are certainly some ‘quick wins’ in here you could implement straight away in your business, but if you need some support, we’re here to help – contact us on 0800 4 POD HR or contact us here.

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